The Work Item - Real Talk on Tech's Toughest Career Choices
Den Delimarsky
The web is full of podcasts that dole out generic career advice - “Follow your passion!”, “Keep learning!”, “Set clear goals!” This is all good if you're just starting out, but the pointers start to lose their luster quickly as you progress and start hitting invisible walls in your growth.
All of a sudden, it's harder to get promoted, opportunities to advance become more ambiguous, and the choices in front of you aren't as obvious as they were when you first started your job.
What does it take to get to the Staff engineer level? If you want to become an executive in the future, what should you do now to maximize your chances of hitting that goal? Should you have a time-bound career map or focus on unique opportunities that pop up serendipitously? Should you try your hand at entrepreneurship, and if so - how do you build a robust safety net?
For these questions and more, The Work Item is the podcast where I attempt to answer them with help from folks that went through trial by fire. They are not social media thought leaders - they are actual practitioners who have first-hand experience dealing with some of the more thorny challenges in this industry.
With folks like Jason Lengstorf (Founder, Learn With Jason), Craig Hewitt (Founder, Castos), Saron Yitbarek (Founder, CodeNewbie), Rob Walling (Founder, MicroConf), Cedric Chin (Founder, CommonCog), Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals), Gennadiy Korol (CEO, Moon Studios), Mayuko Inoue (iOS Engineer, Apple), Camille Fournier, and many, many more you will get extraordinary insights that will help you unlock your career potential beyond the basics you'll learn elsewhere.
All of a sudden, it's harder to get promoted, opportunities to advance become more ambiguous, and the choices in front of you aren't as obvious as they were when you first started your job.
What does it take to get to the Staff engineer level? If you want to become an executive in the future, what should you do now to maximize your chances of hitting that goal? Should you have a time-bound career map or focus on unique opportunities that pop up serendipitously? Should you try your hand at entrepreneurship, and if so - how do you build a robust safety net?
For these questions and more, The Work Item is the podcast where I attempt to answer them with help from folks that went through trial by fire. They are not social media thought leaders - they are actual practitioners who have first-hand experience dealing with some of the more thorny challenges in this industry.
With folks like Jason Lengstorf (Founder, Learn With Jason), Craig Hewitt (Founder, Castos), Saron Yitbarek (Founder, CodeNewbie), Rob Walling (Founder, MicroConf), Cedric Chin (Founder, CommonCog), Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals), Gennadiy Korol (CEO, Moon Studios), Mayuko Inoue (iOS Engineer, Apple), Camille Fournier, and many, many more you will get extraordinary insights that will help you unlock your career potential beyond the basics you'll learn elsewhere.
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 20, 2022 • 34min
#54 - From Apple to Netflix, with Carola Nitz
Carola Nitz is a seasoned engineer who has been involved in a variety of complex projects - from VLC, to Apple Maps, and now working at Netflix on their iOS app experience. She also started her career by learning medical computer science - what a way to jump in!
In this episode, we're learning about her career, what helped her be successful, and how she thinks about the importance of jumps between projects and companies.
You can find Carola on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter
📝 Blog
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Apr 21, 2022 • 37min
#53 - Find Your Mentor And Complementary Skills, With Nicole Zhu, Senior Engineer At Vox Media
There are a few things in your engineering career that you should focus on relentlessly, but few as impactful as finding yourself a guide through the journey, as well as develop a set of complementary skills that can help accelerate your own trajectory. I chatted with Nicole Zhu, Senior Engineer at Vox Media, about the importance of mentorship, peer feedback (or any feedback, for that matter), and how skills that are not directly related to writing code can be more helpful to success than you anticipate.
You can find Nicole on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter📝 Website📰 Newsletter
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Mar 25, 2022 • 39min
#52 - Grow Your Career in Data Science, with Nick Wan, Director of Analytics for Cincinnati Reds
I don't talk about data science enough on this show. To remedy that, I brought in a remarkable analytics and data science expert - Nick Wan, who is a director of analytics for the Cincinnati Reds. Yes - the baseball team. We chat about his track from academia to working for a sports team, and how to build a career outside your typical FAANG (or is it MANGA) scaffolding.
You can find Nick on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter🦹♀️ Twitch
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Mar 11, 2022 • 41min
#51 - Finding Your Engineering Passion, with Vicente Plata of 500 Startups LatAm, Shopify, and More
Vicente Plata is doing way more than one would expect from an engineering leader - not only is he an engineering manager, but he also advises startups and communities, is deeply involved in various mentorship programs, and is someone who is always eager to help.
In this episode we sit down to chat more about his aspirations, how he balances time between all the responsibilities, and what someone working in tech can do to accelerate their career on an exponential trajectory.
You can find Vicente on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter📝 Website
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Mar 4, 2022 • 41min
#50 - Problem And Product Management, with Isaac Hepworth
Today I chat with a good friend, mentor, and an all-around great person - Isaac Hepworth. Isaac is the person you should go to if you want to learn more about what it means to be achieving excellence in the product management space. We chat about the role of a problem solver, what it means to be a PM across different companies and titles, and what one can do to better prepare for an industry that changes by the day.
You can find Isaac on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Feb 17, 2022 • 37min
#49 - Product Management in Government, with Director of Product Management for the City and County of San Francisco, Adrianna Tan
Despite starting a career in product management at one of the big companies, I've never considered to do the same job but working for the government. Not because I didn't want to. Mainly, because I did not know that was even an option. As it turns out - it is, in fact, an option, and a pretty impactful one at that.
To learn more about this career trajectory, I chatted with Adrianna Tan, Director of Product Management for the City and County of San Francisco. She shares her journey as a founder of startups and non-profits, an avid hiker and an advocate for an open web, and how it all combines in her work.
You can find Adrianna on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter
📝 Blog
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Feb 6, 2022 • 38min
#48 - The Story of Working In Developer Relations, with Dan Shaw
This is the brand-new start of the third season of The Work Item podcast, and to make the kick-off even better I sat down with our good friend of the show, Dan Shaw, to learn more about their career. Dan shares the story of bootstrapping a Developer Relations arm at PayPal, wisdom around career decisions, and much more in this episode.
You can find Dan on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter
📝 Blog
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Dec 12, 2021 • 60min
#47 - 2021 Reflections, Creativity, and More, with Mayuko Inoue
The end of 2021 is almost here, and it's time to wrap up the second season of The Work Item. And what better way to do that than to invite a good friend on the show to talk about their journey through the past 12 months? In this episode, I am chatting with Mayuko Inoue about all things 2021, the best choices in comfort foods, McDonalds french fries, thoughts on the content creator career path, and more.
We wanted to make this episode very informal, yet informative. To borrow Mayuko's intro to her own podcast, Muko's Corner (which you should subscribe to) - sit down, get cozy, grab a cup of tea, and enjoy the show!
You can find Mayuko on the following sites:
🎥 YouTube🐤 Twitter📸 Instagram📝 Blog🦹♀️ Twitch🎙 Podcast (Muko's Corner)
If you haven't yet seen Mayuko's “A Day In The Life of a Software Engineer” and “Why Japan Fell Behind in the Tech Industry” - add them to your watch queue!
As a side-note, you can also check out my interview with Mayuko on her channel.
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Dec 5, 2021 • 58min
#46 - From Journalism to Developer Engagement, with Christina Warren
The myth of the superhero programmer - we often hear about it, but it's rarely the reality. Being a superhero on a team takes more than just technical chops, and that's one of the topics that I chat about today with Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft - Christina Warren. You might've seen Christina before on This Week on Channel 9, or even back in the day - at Gizmodo and Mashable.
This episode ended up being less of a career chat and more of a friendly exchange about the latest happenings and what we can learn from them. Yes, we even talk a bit about the re-released Grand Theft Auto: The Definitive Edition.
You can find Christina on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter📝 Website📷 Instagram
And if you want to see more of Clippy (the beloved Office assistant) come to life, you absolutely have to help Christina get to 10,000 followers on Instagram.
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
Nov 28, 2021 • 54min
#45 - Startups, Growth, and A Quest to Build People-focused Companies, with Jennifer Kim
The decision to join a startup or a big company is not an easy one, as one has to consider many factors that go beyond just the financial side of things. In this episode, I talk to Jennifer Kim, a seasoned startup advisor with a lot of experience dealing with these kinds of decisions and more. Jennifer also specializes in the people part of the startup equation - arguably, one of the hardest ones. We chat about the current challenges startups encounter in this space, why it's important to build a diverse workforce, and what one individual can do to be a changemaker in their company's culture.
You can find Jennifer on the following sites:
🐤 Twitter📝 Website
The podcast was produced by Den Delimarsky. Music by Wataboi from Pixabay.
Feedback
If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe to the show and leave a review or a rating, wherever you are getting your podcast. I really appreciate your feedback and am working to make this podcast more useful for you, the listener, with every episode. Ratings and feedback make it so others can easily discover and enjoy the insights you listen to here!
